Privacy

The short version

• We do not store your email address. Our sign-in provider does; we hold only an opaque account identifier.
• There is no advertising network, no analytics service, and no third-party tracking script on this site.
• We do not sell or share personal information, and we never have.
• Your public identity is a pseudonym. Your legal name is not published, and we do not ask for it to read or comment.

Reading without an account

You can read everything here without signing in, and we do not build a profile of you when you do. Our servers write a log line for each request containing the method, path, response status and how long it took. Those lines contain no IP address, no account identifier and no cookie.

Your IP address is used, in memory only, to rate-limit abusive traffic. It is never written to our database or to a log file.

If you create an account

Sign-in is handled by Clerk, an external provider. Clerk holds your email address and login credentials under its own privacy policy. What this site stores about you is:

• a pseudonym, which is the only name shown publicly;
• an opaque identifier from Clerk, plus whether your email was verified — not the address itself;
• your account status, badges and roles;
• whether you are a minor, as a yes or no. Your date of birth and exact age are never stored on your community profile.

Public surfaces show your pseudonym, badges and how long you have had an account. They never show your email, legal identity, verification method, or the exact time you were verified.

What you write

Comments, discussion posts, event submissions and Student Desk contributions are stored with your account and shown under your pseudonym. Assume anything you post publicly is public and will be read by your neighbours.

Reports you file about a problem with the site or with something we published are stored with your account and are visible only to the moderators handling them. Complaint history is never shown publicly.

Location

We never ask for continuous location and the site does not track your position. If you attach a location to a traffic report, the coordinates are rounded to three decimal places — roughly a hundred metres — before they are stored. The precise coordinates never reach our database.

Verification documents

Some roles — an official account, a student contributor — require a one-time check. Documents uploaded for that purpose are stored separately from your profile, are visible only to reviewers, and are deleted automatically 30 days after upload by a scheduled job. They are not kept indefinitely, and we do not perform biometric matching on them.

Automated drafting

Some briefs are drafted with AI assistance from linked public source material, always labeled. Records of those runs are kept for 90 days for accountability and then deleted. Your comments and posts are not used to train any model.

Students and minors

Student contributions carry extra protection. We never publicly expose a student's exact age, class schedule, classroom, address, verification method or legal identity. There is no adult-to-student direct messaging on this site, because there is no direct messaging at all.

What we store in your browser

Two values, both for display preferences: whether you chose light or dark mode, and whether you have already seen the explanation of how the watchlist works. Neither is sent to us. Sign-in itself is handled by Clerk, which sets its own session cookie.

There is no advertising, analytics or tracking script on this site. If that ever changes, this page changes first.

Your rights

California residents have the right to know what personal information we hold, to have it deleted, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for asking. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of.

You can do both yourself, immediately, from your settings: download everything held about your account as a file, or delete the account outright. Deleting removes your profile, display name, watches, notifications and verification records, and closes your sign-in.

Posts that are part of a published discussion are kept in anonymized form rather than deleted, because removing one side of a conversation misrepresents the people who replied to it. Everything else goes.

If you would rather a person handled it, or you want something those controls do not cover, email privacy@mountainhouse.observer from the address on your account and we will respond within 45 days.

Because your email address lives with Clerk rather than with us, a deletion request to us does not by itself delete your Clerk account. Tell us if you want both and we will explain how.

Where data lives, and who sees it

Data is held in a single database operated for Mountain House Observer and is not shared with advertisers, data brokers or analytics companies. Two external services are involved in running the site: Clerk for sign-in, and a model provider used only for the labeled drafting described above. We may disclose information if legally required, and we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that affects what we collect or who sees it, we will say so on the site rather than only editing this page quietly. The same principle governs our corrections log.

Contact

Privacy questions and data requests: privacy@mountainhouse.observer. Security reports: security@mountainhouse.observer. See also our terms of use and editorial standards.